[image:7634 align=right valign=top] FightHunger.org is a site dedicated to "reduce by half the proportion of people who suffer from hunger by 2015". And that is a good cause! So please consider helping them (help us, help yourself!) out. You can do this in at least three ways:

Can you make movies?

If so here’s your chance to win a trip to film a WFP School Feeding project in a developing country. FightHunger: Walk the World is looking for an upbeat viral video that spreads the word about ending child hunger by 2015 – which is part of the first Millennium Development Goal.

Create your video (no longer than 120 seconds) and submit it to your favourite online video service (such as YouTube.com or Google Videos). Read the contest rules before you submit your entry. The closing date for entries is 15 Dec 2006. Winners will be listed on this site on 29th Dec 2006.

We can all make a difference to the lives of hungry children by making a donation to Fight Hunger. Even a small donation can help: for just US$34 the World Food Programme (WFP) can feed a child for a whole year.

Do you run a blog?

Then copy the banner to your localsite and write about FightHunger.org!

And while we are on the subject, I'll say something about other CMS-es. My employer is hosting nearly all of the newspapers' websites in the Netherlands. And for one of those newspapaers, the customer wanted additional functionality in his website; a "poll" and "most read". The CMS powering this newspaper site is running J2EE (I wont name the vendor of the CMS but it should be easy to figure out). Now with OSS systems, adding those simple two elements would be trivial; download a module, hack it around a bit if you want to tweak the code, dump it in your local CVS or give it back to the community, do some testing and bring it live. Nothing too complicated. We are talking "poll" and "most read". Not rocket scientists' burn surgery.

Believe it or not. But for those to simple fucntions, the vendor wants that we host two (2!) additional application servers and 2 (times CPU's used) additional CMS licenses. We are talking "poll" and "most read"! Okay, with a bit side criteria but nothing too fancy. Two additional servers, maintenance and licenses adding up to somthing like 10k per month for a period of 36 month long!

With Drupal, "poll" was a standard module and is now in contrib. It is just a couple of 100 lines of code. And "most read" in Drupal (where the number of views is stored in the node data) can be shown in a dozen ways, for example using the hall of fame module or by building some small PHP sniplet.

Now that illustrates the difference between closed source CMS-es and Open Source CMS-es. Sure, if you dont know anything about CMS-es or about Open Source, you might think that using a proprietary CMS will give you some guarantees. But the only thing you really get is an expensive lockin; code wise, functionality wise and data wise. Making it hard -very hard- and expensive -very expensive- to migrate to something cheaper. Sad but true. And thats why there are still so many overpriced underdelivering proprietary CMS-es out there; you can check in any time you want. You can get a ProofofConcept for free...